Kim Stone poses with the Miami Heat's NBA Championship trophies.
You can always get better, or CANI (Continuous And Neverending Improvement) IS A MOTTO to live by for Kim Stone, executive vice president and general manager, AmericanAirlines Arena and The Heat Group, Miami. Stone is an avid learner, a fair-minded manager and, apparently, tireless. Since 2006, she has been in charge of everything that is fan-experience related, from season ticketholder retention to parking, food and beverage and housekeeping at the Miami arena, home of the champion NBA Miami Heat.
She is not only one of the few-ever female GM’s of a National Basketball Association arena, she also reached that peak through a most unorthodox route — journalism and public relations. Her accomplishments and her leadership earned her one of the 2013 Venues Today Women of Influence awards.
When Eric Woolworth, president of Business Operations, The Heat Group, tapped Stone to replace Alex Diaz as GM of AmericanAirlines Arena in 2006, he did so because of her proven leadership qualities. “When I told her I was going to make her the GM of the building, she looked at me like, ‘Are you crazy?’ In typical Kim fashion she said, ‘You know I know nothing about running a building,’” he recalled. “And I said, ‘I know but you’re really smart and really capable and people will follow you. So you learn on the job,’ and so she did.”
The deciding factor for Stone was that Woolworth believed in her, perhaps more than she believed in herself. Despite never having been unemployed for more than 15 minutes, she has faced adversity in her career climb, which started as a journalism major at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and carried her to university sports information positions to PR for the Miami Heat to operations for the WNBA Miami Soul to VP of season ticketholder retention for the Heat.
CANI was the driving principle when she decided to go back to school to get her master’s in business so she could better understand her first job in operations when she took over the business side for the WNBA Miami Soul.
“I learned that my journalism and PR degree wasn’t enough and you have to know business,” she said. “I went back and got my executive MBA in 2003.” Her three-years of graduate schooling (while working full time) “was a paradigm shift in how I see the world.”
From PR to Ops
Stone always loved sports, back as far as being sports editor of her high school newspaper. She transferred from UNC Wilmington, where she was a marine zoology and geology major, to UNC Chapel Hill where she finessed her way into the journalism school. Growing up in North Carolina, her sport of choice has always been basketball.
During collge, she interned for USA Boxing, where she also learned the value of networking. She worked for Leslie King, who gave her a referral to Rick Brewer, sports information director at UNC Chapel Hill which led to a coveted student sport information director job. King also referred her to Larry Wahl, sports information director at the University of Miami, where she worked in sports information during the Dennis Erickson-era “which means I got exposed to a lot of the top sports journalists at the time,” Stone said.
In 1996, an opening at the Heat organization in PR presented her big opportunity. “One of my goals had always been to work with the Miami Heat. When I joined, they were only eight years old.”
The Journey Heats Up
Between July 1996 and today, Stone’s life has been the Miami Heat, first on the basketball side and now in operations.
She finds every day thrilling, from championship parades for the Heat to becoming a ghostwriter for legendary coach Pat Riley.
A month after being hired to do Heat PR, she was standing in a coffee nook and felt something behind her. Someone had come into the room. “And there sat Pat Riley. I’ll never forget that. ‘You are here! You are him,’ I said. What luck. I was hired and then he was hired.”
For four years, she worked closely with Riley, even ghostwriting his Coach’s Corner column in the Miami Heat Magazine. Riley showed her to look for the bigger reason, the bigger goal, the bigger purpose in life, Stone said. She considers the time she spent with Riley priceless and soaked up all she could, like how to overcome adversity, that it’s not a setback if you learn and grow and continue on your journey.
“He always says in every adversity there is a silver lining. Don’t let bad things sidetrack you. Rewrite the script and continue on,” she learned.
The Heat Group grew rapidly during the Riley era, particularly in media scrutiny, and Stone was at the epicenter. At the time, the NBA team was a tenant at Miami Arena.
In 1998, the team began construction of AmericanAirlines Arena, which opened in 2000. Stone began to see a ceiling in PR.
She made a pitch to become director of operations for the planned WNBA team and got it. She became “an executive-in-training-wheels.” Hers was a hybrid job, much like it is now, where she reported to both basketball and operations.
Launching the WNBA team coincided with opening AmericanAirlines Arena and, unfortunately, with a downward spiral for the Heat. To read the media reports, the building was not great and the resident team was not meeting expectations and, in 2002, the owner responded by divesting all but core assets — the Heat and the arena. “It’s the nature of sports,” Stone said. “We were in the trough of one of our cycles.”
Eight full-timers, including Stone, as well as the players and coaches were about to be out of a job.
“I drove into work that day just sobbing, sobbing, sobbing. Sometimes you can do everything right, work as hard as you can and still fail. That’s where Pat Riley’s silver lining comes in,” Stone said.
She was offered two new jobs that same day. “One was to be chief of staff for our president (Woolworth), who had just fired everybody; the other was to go back to the basketball side and do PR. I decided to go to the business side; I have a passion for that.”
Stone worked as Woolworth’s chief of staff from 2002 to 2004. When the team recruited Shaquille O’Neal, business boomed. Woolworth promoted Stone again, this time to VP of service for season ticketholders. From 2004 to 2006, she handled season ticket retention and managed to maintain the largest season ticketholder base in the NBA, which she will only peg as “above 16,000.”
Servicing and retaining season ticketholders was in its infancy, she recalled. “Now there is a lot of science behind it. Big data helps us with decisions, strategy, how to interface, policies, but we’re always focusing on the relationship between the rep and the person. If you know me on a first name basis and you can get me into the High Five club where my nephew slaps the hand of the player, that’s more important.”
That's just half her day; her responsibilities expanded to include GM of the venue.
When Woolworth called her back into his office that day in 2006, Stone asked what folder she should bring. She likes to be prepared. He told her not to bring anything, and her heart stopped.
But when she was invited to the quieter lounge area of his office, not a behind-the-desk encounter, she realized it would be friendly. He told her Diaz was leaving and he wanted her to take the GM job. “He said, ‘You’re not going to be changing light bulbs. You are going to be managing and leading the team and I think you can do it,’” she remembers.
Woolworth already had the organizational structure in mind, with Jim Spencer elevated to assistant GM on the operations and construction side, and Brian Babin on the basketball front of house and event services side.
Stone left the office, went on a six-mile run on the beach, slept on it and the next day, made her story by taking the job.
Learning is Continuous
Stone spent the next 12 months working every single event, from catering to concerts, awards shows to Heat games, to understand her new job and to gain respect from the hardworking people who do the job every day.
Don Rankin, Pritchard Sports & Entertainment, has had the cleaning contract at the building from the beginning and, as a vendor reporting to Stone, he has admired her leadership skills from day one. “Kim took over with no experience running a building. She’s extremely bright and articulate and she knows what she doesn’t know. She has developed a team and empowered them and over the years she has learned what they all do. She’s among the most elite facility managers that I’ve ever dealt with,” Rankin said.
Stone’s departments today are parking, operations, engineering, event services, guest services, cleaning, food and beverage (handled by Levy Restaurants), event security (Contemporary Services Corp.), Miami Police Department and fire.
“Then I have my other season ticket services side and the VP of season ticket services reports to me,” Stone said.
Her hybrid role is quite unorthodox for a venue GM. Eric Bresler, AEG, who has known Stone for years, noted: “She has a passion for people, a passion for the staff who work for her and she cares deeply about the fan who comes to the arena. There aren’t many venue managers who have a direct responsibility for season ticketholders. When you build that rapport with season ticketholders, it blends into how you look at operating the venue from a staff standpoint and how you deal with people.”
Stone’s best advice for women in this industry is “go for it. It gives me goose bumps. This is an industry that is pretty gender blind as far as I can tell.”
The venue industry is taxing — on your family and your personal time, she admits, adding that it is also very rewarding.
She has managed to nurture a family life as she has climbed the ladder and now has a two-and-a-half-year-old son, Quinton Clark Jones-Stone, and a partner of six years, Karla Jones-Stone. They married in Vancouver, British Columbia.
To accommodate family and work, they bought a home six miles from the arena so she can go home at lunch. Together time is a priority. Sometimes, Karla and Quinton come to the office and he dribbles on the practice court.
Going into the 2013 NBA championships, she already had Tuesday, the day of Game 6, at AmericanAirlines Arena, planned. She would work from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. (office mode), go home from 3-4 pm (family mode) and return to the arena from 4 p.m. to 2 a.m. (game mode).
“Life is complex — apparently I like it that way. I like challenges, change, trying something new, improving — all for the right reasons,” Stone concluded. “I’m a little unorthodox.”